Tuesday, December 21, 2010

A different kind of waiting

You know what I hate about editing? Rendering. Waiting on them to finish, specifically. Once I finish something and watch it dozens of times trying to catch tiny imperfections, inevitably after waiting on the half hour+ render to finish, I'm going to notice something that slipped by my previously sharp detection device (eg: my tired eyes). And so I have to go in and fix it. Then re-render the whole thing again. This process has repeated itself up to 5 times before.

It's annoying.

As you may have noticed, we were finally able to shoot the next entry. It was pretty miserable. We woke up early so we'd have plenty of time to shoot. Unfortunately, we forgot to check the weather. Steady rain all morning. Freezing rain. Since we were already behind on our posting schedule, we pushed on. It's about a 15-20 minute walk from the car to the location, so hauling all the equipment down there, while trying to somehow keep it dry felt like some kind of crucible. I think it's a small miracle we made it there at all. I was wearing four layers and a rain jacket and was still numb. I guess I'll never be used to anything besides sweltering southern heat. Actually, come to think of it, I'm not used to that either.

It went surprisingly smoothly once we started shooting, though. I think it only took six takes to get everything right. The fact that we were all human glaciers probably had something to do with that.

5 comments:

I think your audience appreciates the content during such a miserable and particularly busy festive period. Not a lot of producers are coming up with solid results around this time of year, so people appreciate the effort!

Nice work on the new entry, particularly with #29 having been released only a short while ago.

I like to render an uncompressed AVI as a preview to watch the video through before I render the real thing. The resulting file is enormous, but it renders faster and usually saves me time in the long run because I tend to make at least one mistake with every video. :x

Rendering time is the devil. My animation teacher was telling us about how sometimes his projects get SO fucking huge that the AfterEffects just plain wouldn't render it out, so he had to render individual frames and then string them all together again. Imagine doing THAT and then realizing you had to fix something...

As for MH, seriously, we were all just impressed that you got something out less than a week after the previous entry. The day you chose to post it, though, had a bunch of people going "OMAG it has something to do with the eclipse/solstice!", hurr.

God, I know about the heat. And the rain. Alabama is an unforgiving pop-up weather bitch. But she's beautiful.

And rendering? I don't know much about it, but my film friends complain ALL. THE. TIME. about it. But, I've messed with it... and I've figured out that, YES it's a pain in the ass, BUT it's worth it when the final product comes 'round.